In today's economy companies are frequently turning to software solutions to help integrate and streamline business processes and lower overall operational costs. For example, a typical business may include a variety of organizations such as accounting, purchasing, sales, warehousing, human resources, etc. The specialized needs of each organization leads to each organization using their own software system designed to handle the functions and tasks to be performed. For example, accounting may utilize a special financial software system which allows for convenient entry of a company's assets and liabilities while sales may utilize a different software system which allows for easy order entry and tracking.
Although each organization performs different functions it is, of course, necessary that the organizations exchange and retrieve information with one another on a timely basis. For instance, once sales has received a signed purchase agreement from a customer indicating that the customer has committed to purchasing a given number of products, the sales department must immediately inform the accounting department of the transaction such that the transaction may properly be logged in the accounting records. To communicate this information it is possible for an individual in the sales department to send a paper or electronic form to the accounting department indicating the transaction which has taken place. Unfortunately, such procedures are often cumbersome and result in errors. For such reasons, enterprise wide software management systems have been developed.
Enterprise wide software management systems integrate both heterogenous and homogeneous software systems such that information may be exchanged, retrieved and updated among many systems and clients in real time. For instance, in the example above, an enterprise wide software management system would provide the appropriate connectivity to allow the accounting records to be automatically updated upon an individual from the sales department entering information related to the new purchase order. Thus, there is no need for the sales department to track and forward this information consciously to the other appropriate organizations in the company thereby minimizing overhead and reducing the possibility of introducing errors into the information to be shared.
In order to provide the necessary connectivity among different software systems and other clients in a particular business or corporation, specialized consultants or other information services individuals are often contracted by the business entity to configure a given enterprise wide software management system to meet the precise needs of the company. Configuring an enterprise wide software management system to a particular companies needs may often take several months to several years to complete depending on the size of the project at hand.
As companies and businesses continue to grow and expand, a recent trend has been to integrate wireless communications into a company's network infrastructure to help further optimize operations. For instance, wireless communication devices may take the form of wireless bar code readers which are used in a company's warehouse to help track inventory, wireless pen computing devices which may be used by individuals on a manufacturing floor to log problems or request replacement parts, and wireless arm mounted terminals which may be used by warehouse pickers to receive orders for replacement parts in real time so that the order may be filled immediately. As the price of these and other wireless computing devices continues to drop, the use of such devices by a company to increase productivity and efficiency continues to grow.
In companies having an enterprise wide software management system it is desirous to integrate wireless computing devices into to the enterprise wide system in order to utilize the wireless computing devices to their maximum potential. For instance, prior to the introduction of wireless computing devices into a company's manufacturing facility, an enterprise wide software management system may have been configured to send all requests for replacement parts to a central computer near a company's stockroom of replacement parts. Pickers who physically fill the requests would periodically check and retrieve new orders from the computer system or inform the requester if parts were currently unavailable. Upon providing each picker with a wireless arm mounted terminals, however, it would be desirous for replacement part requests to be routed directly to the appropriate picker's wireless terminal by the enterprise wide software management system. Further, it would be desirous for the picker to be able to respond directly back to the enterprise wide software management system as to whether the order has been filled or if the parts were unavailable and to automatically update the appropriate software systems in the company of the picker's transactions.
While it may be possible to reconfigure the enterprise wide software management system to provide the appropriate connectivity between each wireless terminal and the other software systems in a company, such reconfiguration would be extremely costly and time consuming. For instance, during reconfiguration, the enterprise wide software management system may need to be taken off line for several days or months so that the system can be updated with appropriate routing commands for each new wireless terminal. Further, such difficulties of updating and reconfiguring the enterprise wide software management system would occur each time additional wired and/or wireless terminals was to be fully integrated into the company's network infrastructure.
Therefore, what is needed is a method and apparatus of integrating wired and wireless devices into an existing computer network running an enterprise wide software management system which overcomes the difficulties described above and others.